Dear colleagues,

As we step into the new year, we sincerely wish you resilience and hope amidst these challenging times. We sincerely hope that despite the difficulties, you find moments of strength and tranquillity.

As part of the Development Studies Association’s annual conference this year, we're organising three panels under the theme 'Gender Justice in Troubled Times'. The hybrid conference will be hosted by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, from June 26-28.

For these panels, we conceptualise gender justice as attempts to recognise, visibilise, challenge, and dismantle the structures and practices that perpetuate gender-based inequalities. Gender justice calls for a historical and global understanding of social, economic, ecological and political systems that contribute to/ exacerbate discrimination and oppression while remaining attentive to the specifics of the local. In our conceptualisation (s), we are inspired by the scholarship and activism of prolific gender justice proponents, which ground our understanding within an intersectional framework, rooted in a politics of care, redistribution, recognition, and representation. We invite co-conspirators to help us understand, expand on and solidify our vision of what gender justice looks like, how it operates, and what it comes up against in its revisioning (and restructuring) of the world in which we live. We, therefore, welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and creative work which unsettles the boundedness of single-disciplinary thought, while provoking, resisting, prodding, and picking away at systems of injustice and inequalities. We are open to different ways in which gender is used as an analytical tool and we welcome and encourage more expansive conceptions of gender beyond the binary.

These panels invite participants to think critically about the question of gender justice across different development domains:

1. Gender justice and environmental crises;

2. Gender justice in times of violence and conflict;

3. Gender justice, work, re/production, and exploitation

We invite you to submit abstracts for any of the three panels by the deadline, Tuesday, January 23, 2024. Submissions should include a short abstract (<300 characters) and a long abstract (<250 words). For more details and to submit your abstracts, please visit:  https://nomadit.co.uk/conference/dsa2024/p/14919

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to get in touch. Thanks very much. 

Warmly,

Sharmila Parmanand, Mirna Guha and Reetika Revathy Subramanian 

Womxn and Development Study Group Co-Convenors